Brazil Speakers 2017

Renata Broglia Mendes, founder of social business Actveda, is a specialist in wellbeing and self-knowledge where she has been working professionally for more than 14 years with the Yoga, Ayurveda and Meditation tools in Brazil, India and the United States. Graduate in Business at PUC-SP, pós graduate in Yoga at FMU and in Management of Social Innovation at the Amani Institute and certified by the Non Violent Communication Community, she develops lectures and courses related to the culture of peace, conflict mediation and selfknowledge. Since 2003 she has been coordinator of the Aparigraha Project, empowering girls in juvenile incarceration in São Paulo through Yoga and self-management techniques. In August of 2016, she founded the Mundo Aflora Institute to create opportunities for former inmate girls to be reintegrate into society and make new choices.

Born in southern Brazil, but raised in the far north, in Roraima, the visual artist Ana Mendina has her work inspired by nature and its relationship with humans, closely associated with Amazon and Indigenous cultures of the world, especially the Yanomami and Sanoma people of which the artist is currently a partner at Hutukara Association Yanomami- HAY (www.hutukara.org) Painter, photographer, illustrator and director, Mendina attended art schools in Costa Rica, Australia and New Zealand, where the artist studied at the traditional Waiariki Maori School of Design. The history and culture of the aborigines in Australia, the Maori in New Zealand and the people of the Amazon rainforest, composes an ethnic mosaic of her artistic and colorful world. Drawings and paintings on paper, canvas, walls and people under the influence of colors, lights and forms from fauna and flora. She also uses photography and video to express the ideas or all media together in a concept called Mixed Media. Her sharp eyes portrays a unique artistic setting that reflects itself in the work as if it were the mirror of nature. www.anamendina.org